Sunday, November 6, 2011

Ross Douthat's column in the New York Times today has got to be one of the dumbest editorials I've read in quite some time. Douthat correctly identifies a hyper educated, very sophisticated and highly intelligent Wall Street elite as the source of many of out nation's current ills. But in suggesting that the Republican electorate is in search of a more "down-to-earth" candidate to serve as a counterweight to these people he ignores two very important realities: (1) from 2000 to 2008 this nation was governed by a dim-witted Texan whose educational acheivements were "brought to you by the letter 'C'" and who had difficulty so much as putting together an entire sentence without committing a grammatical atrocity. It was a government headed by this sort of "down to earth" politician that witnessed and enabled Wall Street's recklessness. (2) Anyone who has paid even a moment's attention to the cries of the Tea Party and the blathering of the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls realizes that these people don't blame the Wall Street elite or the banks for our current economic state. It is an article of faith among theabaggers that Washington regulations were to blame for the crisis, and the solution to our ills is to give evenmore freedom and leeway to the Wall Street wiz kids that Douthat lambastes.

As best I can tell, Douthat's column is simply an attempt to make sense of the shallow vulgarity of the GOP's current anti-intellectual tendencies without acknowledging the simple fact that the GOP electorate demonstrates these inclinations because they are fostered by a conservative elite that sees anti-intellectualism as a bullwark against the emergence of economic class consciousness. The GOP faithful don't despise the intellectual elite because they believe them to have brought about the 2008 financial crisis. They despise them because the massive and well funded conservative propaganda machine sees it in its interests to decry supposed "class warfare" while fostering resentment of the nation's intelligentsia.